The Devoured Earth (22 page)

‘What would I know?’ he told it. ‘I’m as much in the dark as you are. In fact, if you’ve got any suggestions…’

It blinked once and tucked itself under Kelloman’s left ear.

‘I didn’t think so.’

The guard cleared his throat and scowled. Skender took the hint and sat down on the cold stone floor next to the mage.

* * * *

THE CRASH

‘A seer’s life is an unhappy one.

Change and death are the only certainties.

Everything else is negotiable.’

THE BOOK OF TOWERS
, EXEGESIS 19:11

elp me!
Shilly woke in the smoky darkness and opened her eyes wide. Her heart was racing. The sides of her cot seemed to rock and sway; a stink of sulphur filled her nostrils. In her mind, she saw a glowing blue flower that shattered into millions of tiny stars, and from somewhere startlingly close by she heard a sound like a thousand flints striking at once.

She forced her old bones to move, and sat up. The darkness rolled back as a golden glow filled the workshop. She tugged away the curtains from her alcove and gasped at the magnificent sight before her.

The charm was alive. That was her first thought. All the many lines she had carved in the long decades past now burned with a liquid golden light. The air shimmered over the pattern as though intensely hot. The pattern itself seemed to shift and flex, as potent as molten iron. Her keen, analytical eye saw that the work she had done had not been for nothing. Every line was perfect. The charm itself fairly sizzled with power.

She had finished it that very night, putting the final touches on one small section almost reluctantly, for she had been working towards the charm’s completion for so long that she had never truly thought about what would happen afterwards. Bartholomew had waited patiently and hadn’t reprimanded her for spending too long on the last details, fussing over angles and line width to a degree that was extreme even for her. Eventually she had had to concede that her work was done, and had sat back on her haunches and watched the man’kin apply the resin. It gleamed like honey under the yellow light of the swaying glowstones. For several minutes, the only sound had come from the soft motions of the moist brush against sand; then even that finished, and there was silence.

Neither of them had moved. Neither looked around at the charm that stretched to every corner of the cave. They were, in fact, sitting directly on the charm, and she felt a startling pang of alienation, as though now it was complete it had no use for her. She was just an old woman whose moment was over. The charm was all that mattered.

They had stayed that way for an unknown length of time. When Shilly did go to move, her knees had locked up and required a considerable amount of cursing to get moving again. Bartholomew didn’t move at all, not when she called his name, not even when she rapped on the top of his stony head to attract his attention.

‘Taking a nap, eh? I don’t blame you. Think I’ll do the same.’

She hadn’t retired immediately, however. First she’d made a cup of tea from her dwindling supplies and allowed herself a small meal. As she ate, she noticed the veins showing through the papery skin of her wrists. Veins and bones. Her left hand still hurt from where she’d stabbed herself a month earlier. She wasn’t healing like she used to.

That might have been a concern before she’d finished the charm. Now, she wasn’t so sure. The thought of death didn’t frighten her as much as the thought of lingering. She smiled upon realising that what she felt more than anything was restlessness. She didn’t want to sit there and rot any more than Sal had truly wanted to set down roots in Fundelry. Even though they had spent five good years there, she had sensed his wanderlust. She had known that the road was his only true home. If it had been safe for them to leave Lodo’s workshop and move around in the open, she was sure he would have forced the issue at some point.

And then what? Perhaps Tom would never have found them after his dream about the caves of ice. Perhaps they would have been well away from the mountains when Yod broke free. Perhaps Sal wouldn’t have been lost with the others, leaving her to spend the rest of her life alone.

Sleep had been hard to come by that night, and now it was disturbed by nightmares and the awakening of the charm. The sense-fragments of her dream clung to her still: the shattered blue crystal; the smell; the world rolling underfoot.

Standing impassively on the charm’s fiery surface was Bartholomew, who still hadn’t moved. His face was uplit, almost sinisterly so, by the golden glow.

He’s dead
, she realised with a pang of sadness. His job was done, his purpose fulfilled, so he had simply stopped being.
Typical man’kin. just when you think you’re getting to know them, they turn you upside down and kick you in the arse
.

She rubbed the back of her skull, where an old injury seemed to be aching. But she had never hurt her head that way, not in this life. She had to be receiving impressions from her younger self. Something was going on in that other world. And the charm was responding to it, resonating with a completely different pocket of the universe.

‘Hang in there,’ she whispered. Then she half-laughed, unsure which version of herself she was talking to. ‘Hang in there, Shilly. It can’t be all bad.’

She almost believed it until, with a sound like a thousand candles all going out at once, the charm’s golden fire suddenly died and she was plunged into darkness.

* * * *

The first thing Kail saw when he opened his eyes was the small pouch he normally wore around his neck. It was lying two metres away from him in the snow, barely visible in the darkness. He didn’t know where he was or how he had got there, but he knew the pouch was in the wrong spot. He needed to put it back around his neck, where it belonged.

He lay on his side in the snow. Cold had seeped into his bones, making energy hard to muster. He lifted his head, then tentatively stretched out his right arm; his feet kicked out, moving him forward a little, then retracted and kicked again. He moved thus, in tiny increments, until his gloved fingers touched the pouch, gripped it, and pulled it close.

Relief flooded through him.
Nothing seems to be broken
, he thought, then wondered why he had thought there might be. Questions about what he was doing lying in the snow reared up again. Lying in the snow and worrying about cracked bones and skull.

He sat up in several painful stages and slipped the pouch’s thong over his head. It caught in his pack, which he found he was still wearing. His hat was missing. A length of rope hung from his belt. He reeled it in and discovered that the far end was frayed. Something was on the verge of coming to him. He could feel it nudging at his conscious mind, trying to get his attention.

Something about falling…?

‘Are you all right?’ a woman asked him. She stood less than three metres from him, but he hadn’t heard her approach. He hadn’t, in fact, even noticed his surroundings beyond the pouch. He appeared to be tucked into a sheltered niche at the intersection of two near-vertical snowdrifts. To his right, a steep slope led up from the bottom of the niche into darkness. Above him was nothing but the black night sky. There were no stars. For a moment he wondered if he was back under the Hanging Mountains.

‘Did you hear me?’ The woman came a step closer. He struggled to focus on her, aware that he was shivering much more than seemed healthy. Her face was partly hidden behind a deep hood. Her black robe looked decidedly out of place against the crisp white snow.

‘I heard you,’ he said. ‘I just didn’t know how to answer your question.’

‘Fair enough, I guess.’ She took another step. ‘Let’s take one thing at a time, then, and see where we end up. Do you need help standing?’

He could see the sense in moving, even if his bones cursed the idea. Sitting in the snow much longer would only see him dead, sooner rather than later. He had to get up.

He got one leg under him, then, with her help, the other. His head ached and spun, but he did manage to stay on his feet.

‘You’re taller than you looked,’ she said, edging away.

He resisted the impulse to say that she was shorter than she looked. ‘The only way I could hurt you would be by falling on you.’

‘What are you doing out here? You don’t look like one of the Ice Eaters.’

‘The who?’

She smiled faintly. ‘I guess you’re not one of them, then. You must be with the others.’

He rubbed his temple in puzzlement. Slowly the veils were parting. ‘I think — I think I fell.’

‘Not from the balloon. You weren’t aboard when we left the tower.’

‘No. I was climbing, then flying. We took a short cut past the Old Ones. There was a bright light. I woke up here.’ He clutched the pouch tightly in his right hand.

Her face had become very serious. ‘So, Tatenen is sticking his nose in again, huh? That probably means Pukje is lurking about somewhere.’

‘Pukje?’ The name triggered a whole chain of memories. ‘Yes, Pukje. We were riding him up into the mountains. He took us to Tatenen. He had a plan.’

‘He always does. That’s the one thing about him you can be sure of.’

He frowned at her. ‘How do you know who Pukje is?’

‘I never exchange stories with someone whose name I don’t know.’

‘Habryn Kail,’ he said, taking off a glove and holding out his hand.

She took and shook it. ‘Call me Ellis. Your fingers are freezing. I think you’ve been out here a little too long for your own good. We should get you to shelter.’

‘What about you?’

‘Oh, I’m fine. This robe is much heavier than you’d guess.’ She put an arm around his waist and took some of his weight. ‘Come on. I know somewhere you can rest for a while, get your strength back. It’s not far, but we need to get moving before you freeze solid.’

He didn’t have the strength to argue, even though all he wanted to do was lie down again and go to sleep. His gait was little more than a shuffle at first, but slowly, painfully, his muscles began to work. Every joint ached, and he became aware of a throbbing in his neck and back that hadn’t been there before. But at least he could still move.

‘I think I’m lucky to be alive,’ he said as they followed the niche into a ravine that had been completely invisible from his supine position. Its walls grew steeper and closer together until there was barely enough room for the two of them to stand side by side. ‘We were pretty high when I fell.’

‘Did Pukje throw you?’

‘No. There was an explosion of some sort out over the lake, then a terrible wind.’

She nodded. ‘That would be Gabra’il trying to get out of the Tomb. He’ll have to be cleverer than that if he ever hopes to succeed.’ When he looked askance at her, she dodged the unspoken question. ‘It doesn’t matter. Just keep walking.’

Something she had said earlier came back to him. ‘You were on the balloon?’

‘Yes.’

‘With Marmion?’ He wondered then if she was from Milang, one of the Guardian’s ministers who had come along for the ride.

‘No,’ she said. ‘He was busy elsewhere.’

Kail frowned, remembering the fragmentary communication Sal had received from Skender as they had left Tatenen. Something about an attack. ‘Where is he now? What happened to the balloon?’

‘Save your strength, Habryn Kail. You’ll find out soon enough.’

A suspicion began to nag at him, but he kept it unspoken.
Soon enough indeed
, he told himself. If she had wanted to kill or overpower him, she could have easily done so earlier, before he was moving.

The ravine became little more than a crack slicing into the side of the mountains. When it was too dark to see, the woman called Ellis produced a mirror from under her robe and shone its light ahead of them.

The ravine plunged downward for twenty metres, and Kail was forced to concentrate on the icy and treacherous rocks beneath his feet. By the mirrorlight, he could see the tracks of the woman’s original ascent, and no others. She had clearly come this way alone, but for what reason? What could possibly bring her back to such an isolated, forbidding place?

He found the answer to the question around a slight bend in the ravine. It widened and became an icy hall whose walls glittered and gleamed in the mirrorlight. Slender stalactites hung down from vast buttresses that reached in graceful curves up to a distant ceiling of solid ice. A ragged hole had been torn through that ceiling, and as his eyes adjusted to the new scenery he saw a black scar stretching down one wall. What lay at the base of the scar was hidden for the moment behind a mound of old ice and fresh snow. Only as Ellis led him along the base of the ravine and around the mound did it come into view.

The wreckage of the balloon lay nose down on the floor of the ravine. Nearby lay the gondola, tipped on one side and in only slightly better repair. Uncontrolled chimerical discharge had burned large sections of both gasbag and gondola to ash, exposing the skeletal structure beneath. They were crumpled and bent like the wings of a crushed moth.

On sight of it, his heart froze in midbeat. Without thinking, he shrugged free of Ellis and ran forward to check the gondola. Its interior was blistered and burnt, but not completely destroyed. The rear was relatively intact and might have provided shelter for anyone still aboard. Snow already dusted parts of the wreckage, indicating that it had been there for some time.

The bodies he had feared to find were absent.

‘You can shelter here,’ said Ellis. ‘It should be safe enough, now. I’ll go find the others and —’

He didn’t give her the chance to finish that sentence. In two paces, he had her in a headlock. With the advantage of height and mass, he overpowered her as easily as he would a child.

‘Who are you? What have you done?’

She squirmed. ‘— choking — me —’

He eased his grip, but only slightly. ‘I’ll do worse than that if you don’t answer my questions.’